Chapter 7

Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924)

  • Many firsts:

    • First American doctoral degree in psychology

    • First American student in the first year of the first psychology lab (Leipzig)

    • Began what is often considered to by the first psychology laboratory in the US

    • Began the first psychology journal (American Journal of Psychology)

      • published too many copies

    • unimpressed with wundt’s lab and more focused on the physiological side of psychology

    • Frist president of Clark University

      • wanted a graduate program for the univsersity; focused on research work instead of teaching

    • Helped organize the APA and was also the first president

    • One of the first applied psychologists to be interested in psychoanalysts

    • Suffered manic-depressive episodes

      • died at the age of 80

    • opposed to co-ed undergrad education, but accepted women as students and staff iin the graduate program

    • Encouraged black, Japanese , and jewish students to enroll

Side Bar: Francis Cecil Summer (1895-1954)

  • The first black American to earn a PhD in psychology (1920)

  • He studied with Hall at Clark

  • Became chair of the psychology department at Howard University

  • Considered the “Father of Black Psychology”

Inez Beverley Prosser (1895-1934)

  • First black american women to earn PhD (1933)

  • Studied educational psychology and racial discrimination

  • Research was used in the arguments in the Brwon vs. Borad of education ruling

  • d

Evolution and the Recapitulation theory of development

  • Hall’s single theme: evolutionary theory

    • Believed that the normal growth of the mind involved a series of evolutionary stages

    • Method: questionares

    • Recapitulation theory: children in their personal development repeat the life history of the human race, evolving from infancy to childhood to rational human being

    • The Adolescence book became controversial because of focus on sex

    • Wrote Senescence (1922), the first large-scale survey of the psychological issues of old age

The Founding of Funtionalism

  • Functionalism was not started intentionally

  • Began as a protest against the restrictions and limitations of Wundt’s version of psychology and of Titchener’s structuralism

  • No single form to functionalsim

  • Emphasis on:

    • Mental functions: look at real-world problems

    • How people function in, and adapt to, different environments

The Chicago School

  • In addition to James, there were two other psychologists that contributed to the “founding” of functionalism

    • John Dewey

    • James Rowland Angell

John Dewey (1859-1952)

  • Practical orientation: applying psychology to educational and philosophical problems

  • Dewey’s most important work involves the reflect arc

    • Reflex arc: the connection between sensory stimuli and motor responses

    • Dewey argues that neither behavior nor conscious experience could be reduced to elements

    • Reflect forms a circle instead of an arc because of the child’s perception of the flame changes, thus serving a different function

    • Did not think function and structure were different from each other

James Rowland Angell (1869-1949)

  • Was the major trainign groud for psychologists that followed after him

  • The province of functional psychology:

    • Textbook psychology (1904) embodies the functionalist approach

    • Goal of psychology: study how the mind assists the organism in adjusting to its environment

    • Three major themes of functionalist movement:

      1. the psychology of mental operations (not elements)

      2. the psychology of the fundamental utilities of consciousness

      3. the psychology of psychophysical relations (mind-body relations)

Functionalism at Columbia University

  • Another form of functionalism developed at Columbia University

  • Other contributors:

    • James McKeen Cattell: work on mental tests

Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869-1962)

  • got his phd in 1889

  • after he retired he continued to lecutre to large classes then finally retired at 89

  • Disliked the constraints imposed by membership in any school of thought

  • An important point of view:

    • Dynamic psychology- Woodworth’s system, which was concerned with the influence of casual factors and motications on feelings and behaviors

    • Viewpoint was constructed not out of protest but by extending, elaborating, and synthesizing what he considered to be appropriate features of other approaches

Criticisms of Functionalsim

  • Came mostly from structuralism

  • Included:

    • any approach to psychology that deviated from the introspective analysis of the mind into elemets could not truly be called psychology

    • Criticism of the functional psychologist's’ interest in practical concerns

    • Ongoing dispute between seeing psychology as a pure or as an applied science

Contributions of Functionalism

  • consequences of the shift in emphasis from structure to function:

    • Research on animal behavior

    • incorporated studies of infants, children, and people with mental disabilities

    • Supplemented the introspective mehtod with data obtained from other methods

    • by 1930, the functional vicotyr was complete